Arrows of the Sun (55 page)

Her fingers were cold, but there was heat within, a thread
of fire. They pressed just so, and his hands unfolded.

The left hand was trembling; blisters had risen on it, grey
against the dark skin. The right was all gold, roiling and flowing in the bed
of the
Kasar
.

“Sages,” she said as if to herself, “would set the seat of
power in the loins, or in the heart, or behind the eyes. And so it is, in all
of them and none. But in Sun-blood, wherever it begins, it ends in the hands.
There’s the god’s wit for you. Where else is pain so intense, or so delicately
modulated?”

Estarion had an answer for that. He bit his tongue, but she
read it, perhaps, in his branded palm.

She laughed. “Yes, there, too. But the god set fire there
long ago, and in every man—and in a woman it’s not so easily got at, though
it’s hotter once it starts, and lasts longer. The hands it had to be. Do you
think you’re being brave, bearing pain that would lay strong warriors low?”

“It’s no worse than it ever is,” Estarion said.

“Liar,” she said tenderly. “Ah, child, what a muddle they’ve
made of you.”

“Isn’t that what we all are? Muddle and folly?”

“Everyone doesn’t threaten empires with his muddlement.” She
touched the
Kasar
with a finger. He
gasped: not that it cost pain, but that it cost none. A ripple of coolness
spread outward from her touch.

“How—”

She was not listening. “And you are a threat, youngling.
Never doubt it. You’ll carry on for a while, and think yourself safe; but when
you break again, you’ll break past mending. A Sunlord broken is a terrible
thing. Pure power, and pure mindlessness.”

Yes
, a deep part
of him whispered, looking down into the sea of fire. “No,” he said aloud. “What
do you know of this? What do you know of anything?”

“What do you know, my lord emperor? Have you looked on the
face of the Sunborn in his sleep? Have you stood in the Tower that he made?”

“It has no door,” Estarion said. “And if it did, what good
would it do me?”

“Why,” she said, “none, for all the use you’d have made of
it. A door is a simple thing to make. It’s what it opens on that matters.
Mirain made that Tower of magery, and sealed it with the Sun’s fire. His own
fire, child. The same that burns in you and leaves trails of golden droplets
wherever you go. It’s not simple power such as mages know, that they draw from
earth and air and wield through their bodies. It’s a different thing, both
stronger and stranger. Training alone doesn’t master it. It needs more. It
needs what is in the Tower.”

“And what is that?”

“Strength,” she said. “Knowledge. It’s woven in the stones.
It holds the Sunborn in his sleep, and guards the bones of his descendants. A
night on the crag of Endros would drive a man mad; and so it still might, if
anyone dared the Tower. But a man who is a Sunlord—he needs that madness, that
snatching out of himself. It’s the source of his power.”

Estarion laughed, startling himself. “Oh, you are a master
of talespinners! You almost had me believing you.”

“I hope so,” she said. “It’s almost too late for you. And
that ‘almost’ is more hope than surety.”

“Oh, come,” he said. “Now you’re trying to scare me, as if I
were a child with the night-terrors. I need lessoning in reining in my power, I
admit it. But once this rebellion is put down and the empire is quiet, I’ll
withdraw to a temple; I’ll submit myself to its mages; I’ll learn to master
myself.”

“You have no time,” said Sidani. “Even tomorrow’s sunset
might be too long. Look, you’re bleeding again. That’s blood, child: blood of
power.”

“Then I’ll bleed dry, and be no worse than before.”

For the first time she seemed impatient. “
Tcha
! You are the most exasperating
infant. Power doesn’t bleed like blood, not in Sunlords. It kills you, yes. But
first it kills whatever else it lights on, and it grows stronger instead of
weaker, the longer it bleeds, until there’s no will left, only the power. What
you were when it killed a mage’s soul, what it was when it plucked mages free
of their power as if they had been sea-spiders in their shells—that’s the
barest beginning. Your high priest is dead because you had no mind to notice
that it was he and not a Guildmage standing in your path. What, when you begin
to feed on your priests here, and after them, priests and mages wherever your
power finds them? And when they are gone and your hunger still unsated, what’s
to do but seek the souls of simple men, and consume them?”

“No!” cried Estarion, struggling against her grip, trying to
block his ears, his mind, his awareness that whispered,
Yes. Yes
. “It’s all lies. You’re raving. How can you know this? Who
are you?”

“Sarevadin.”

That was not her voice. It was colder by far, and somewhat
deeper. It came out of the darkness, a shadow, golden-eyed. Another came behind
it.

He almost wept at the sight of them—and no matter the riddle
of their coming in together, priestess and Olenyas, and standing there as if
they had been so for a long while, watching, listening, waiting for their
moment. “Korusan! Vanyi. Thank the god and goddess. I’ve fallen prey to a
madwoman.”

Then the name that Korusan had spoken pierced through the
veils of befuddlement. Korusan spoke it again. “I know what she is. I followed
her here, and your priestess after me. She is Sarevadin. Look, take her hand.”

She had let Estarion go. Instinct cried out to him to thrust
himself as far away as he might, but something made him do as Korusan bade. She
did not resist him, did not seem dismayed, stood smiling faintly as he seized
her hand and turned it palm up.

Gold and ash. Gold—and—

He was not even awed. What struck him first was pity, and
horror of the quenched and twisted thing. “What did you do to yourself?”

“I tried to cut it out,” she said.

He raised his eyes from the ruin of the
Kasar
to the ruin of her face.

No; not ruin. He had always thought her beautiful, with her
proud bones under the age-thinned skin. “You look like your portraits,” he
said.

“Not much, any longer,” she said.

“No,” said Estarion. Obstinacy was a refuge. It kept him
from having to think. “We all know you’re dead, you see. And we look at the
portraits and see the hair, like copper and fire, and take little enough notice
of what’s under it, except that it’s a woman, and beautiful.”

“You’d never hide as I did,” she said.

“Why?”

She knew that he did not mean himself, or his eyes that
could never be mistaken, not in such a face as his, but the fact of her
abandoning it all, throne and empire and the power that she was born to hold.
They had always understood one another. They were of the same blood.

“If you were given a chance at freedom,” she asked him,
“would you take it?”

“That would depend on the price,” he said.

“I paid in my lord’s life. I thought that I should die with him,
and leave our son free to take the throne for which we bred him. I failed in
courage once I’d taken the sword and set myself to fall on it; so I killed
myself who was Sarevadin, but left the body alive. I became no one and
nothing.”

He looked at her. Something monstrous swelled in him,
something that was not joy, nor terror, but a welter of both. “Then I have no
right to any of this. It is yours. You are the empress who should be. You are
the elder heir of the Sunborn.”

“I think,” she said after a long pause, “that this is your
revenge on me for keeping my secret so long.”

Estarion was too numb with shock to be appalled. “You don’t
want it?”

“Youngling,” she said, “do you?”

He sucked in a breath. Her hand was still in his, forgotten.
He laid his own over it,
Kasar
to
Kasar
. It was a perilous thing to do,
but he was past caring.

The lightnings jolted through him. He was fiercer than they.
She stood like a rock in a tiderace, head tilted back, half glaring, half
laughing in his face.

He had not stood face to face with living blood of his
sun-born blood since his father was slain. He had forgotten, if he had ever
known, what it was to know that whatever he was or willed to be, there was one
who was his equal. Or—and that was stranger yet—his better.

“Now will you believe me?” she asked him.

He had almost forgotten what brought them to the quarrel. It
was like her to remember.

“It is true, Starion.” Vanyi, hard and clear. She stood
behind Korusan still, her white robe like a shadow of his black one. “You will lose
yourself in your power, unless you master it.”

“And that needs the Tower in Endros?” Estarion spoke to them
both, all, it hardly mattered. “If I ride out now, will I be alive when I come
to it?”

“There is another way,” said Sarevadin.

Estarion’s glance leaped to Vanyi, caught on Korusan’s
veiled face. That the women had conspired to trap him—he could credit that. But
he did not think that the Olenyas had had any part in it. The boy’s eyes were
wide, blank, astonished.

“Gates,” Estarion said. “But the Mageguild wields them.”

“Did I say it would be easy?” Vanyi was trembling as if with
exhaustion, or with fury held rigidly in check. “You don’t know what you look
like to eyes that can see. The whole of the mage-realm pulses as you breathe.
She”—she would not name the name, Estarion took note of that; had she perhaps
not known until he himself did?—“says that there is a way to tame your power,
to teach you what you have to know without the years that you don’t have. You
don’t even have days.”

“I may be stronger than any of you can guess,” he said.

“You are a worse idiot than we could have imagined.”
Sarevadin slapped him lightly, just enough to sting. In the swift flare of his
temper, she grinned her wild white grin. “There is a way, young one. Yon
priestess says that she can raise a Gate. That’s dangerous; I don’t pretend it
isn’t. But if we move quickly, and if we move as I know how to move, we’ll be
there before the Guild knows what we’ve done.”

“There,” said Estarion, “but not back again.”

“You’ll take us back,” she said. “Or we’ll all die
together.”

“All?” Estarion asked.

“I’m going,” Vanyi said. “I know Gates, and I can stand
guard while you do—whatever you do.”

“But you’re not—”

“She’s not Sun-blood,” Sarevadin said. “She’s not male,
either. She’ll not lose her wits in my father’s Tower.”

Her father. One forgot, or could not encompass it. This was
Sidani the wanderer woman with her wild wit and her scurrilous tales, putting
guardsmen to the blush with the songs she could sing. And it was Sarevadin the
empress, great beauty of her age, great mage, great queen, great lover and
priestess. This, standing by the bier of another empress, bidding Estarion do
the maddest thing that he had ever done.

Walk through a Gate in defiance of the Guild that had risen
against him. Enter the doorless Tower. Look on the sleeper who must not be
waked, and mend his power that was broken, or die in the trying. With a
priestess on Journey for defender, and a madwoman for a guide.

He spread his arms. “Well? Shall we go?”

“No,” said Sarevadin.

His jaw had dropped. He picked it up again.

“It needs time,” she said, “and your mother wants singing to
her rest. And you should sleep. Tomorrow when the rite is sung and the feast is
done, we go. Go light on the wine, youngling. You’ll want your head clear for
the working.”

The hot flush crawled up his cheeks. He fought it with
temper. “All this desperate urgency, and you’ll dally at the end of it?”

“You will dally,” she said. “We will labor long and hard to
make ready. Gates aren’t raised in a heartbeat; Gates warded with secrecy are
slower yet.”

“But I can—”

“You cannot,” she said, flat and implacable. “You will
sleep, if I have to lay a wishing on you, and you will play the emperor as your
people require, and when it’s over, you will find us waiting.” She softened
somewhat. “Don’t worry, child. You’ll have enough and more to do, once you’re
in the Tower.”

Korusan escaped in Estarion’s shadow. They all seemed to
have forgotten him, the women caught up in the working that they must begin, Estarion
in a temper at being sent to bed like a child. He went obediently enough,
Korusan noticed, for all his snarling; he took the he-cub with him, which its
dam did not appear to take amiss.

Korusan did not follow Estarion to his chambers. At first
not caring where he went, then only seeking solitude, he found himself in what
seemed to be an ancient portion of the palace, dank and dim and long
untenanted. A torch was thrust into a wall at one of the turnings. Korusan lit
it with a flint that he carried, with much else, secreted in his robes, and the
steel blade of one of his lesser daggers. It caught sullenly, but burned bright
enough for the purpose.

The cold was deep here, set in the stones. The walls were
faded and peeling, the tiles of the floor broken or gone. The air was heavy
with age and dust.

A stair presented itself. Korusan climbed it. His lips
twitched in spite of themselves. Estarion, when vexed with the need to think,
always climbed as high as he could, and perched there above the babble of the
world; and then, as often as not, did no thinking at all, but simply basked in
the sun.

No sun tonight, but stars like flecks of frost, and
Brightmoon riding high. Her light was cold and pure and, Korusan thought,
rather prim. She had no rival in the sky: Greatmoon would not rise until just
before the dawn.

Korusan stood on a roof that ended in a crumbling parapet.
It gave way behind him to a landscape of peaks and sudden valleys that was the
newer palace, but before him was nothing but a stretch of winter-bare garden, a
high wall, and the roofs of the city. Every so often a guard walked the wall.
The man did not see the shadow on the roof, or else did not reckon it worth
remarking on.